for faults not in our stars
by inkjade
Summary: When there's nowhere to go but down.
1. rock bottom, keep digging anyway

The first three weeks, she doesn't leave her apartment.

She discovers two economy-size boxes of rice-in-a-bag stuffed in the shadowy recesses of the cupboard. They probably passed their expiration dates back when her mother was still living on her own, rattling around her busted old house like a pinball in an abandoned arcade. She eats the rice anyway, when she remembers to; she eats nothing else. The milk goes bad and then the sour cream does too, and by the beginning of the third week every absentminded opening of the fridge is met with a puff of cool, eye-wateringly rotten air that takes her breath away.

She can't remember a single thing she did in those three weeks, but she's worn a path across the living room with her pacing. She cannot stand to have the TV on: the endless circus of overblown, undeserved grief playing there made her physically ill the first and only time she tried to watch. It made her wonder how things had played out, and she doesn't want to wonder.

The mail piles up under her door.

She wakes one morning from a dream of coins flipping and spends two hours cleaning out the fridge. From there she takes on the kitchen, and then the bathroom, and then the living room. She's down to scrubbing with toilet paper and mouthwash before she gives up. Her bedroom she leaves as it is, sheets twisted into an anguished nest on bare mattress, the afghan aunt Nita made for her twenty-fifth birthday tacked over the window because the blinds let in too much daylight, her clothes strewn over dresser and floor like so much garbage. Peeling pineapple-patterned wallpaper from whatever era people thought it was a good idea to make stuff like that. The hardwood floor she'd been so thrilled about when she signed the lease is scraped and dull.

She leaves the last of her severance on the kitchen counter with the keys. She leaves the pictures of her and her mother turned facedown on the dresser. She does her best to leave her memories and her pride stuck to the walls, the floor, the shower curtain and the windows and the furniture; to scrape them off like lint and walk out unburdened. She sheds her name like a dying skin, and steps out onto the street.

She is wearing a sweater and a jacket in spite of the heat of the day, knowing she'll need these things in a few months. Maybe -hopefully- more than she's going to need the batons strapped to her thighs under her jeans.

A gun would be better, would be smarter. But every time she tries to pick hers up she sees his face, all the humanity burned out of it, nothing but rage and gristle left behind, the muzzle of the gun bigger than the goddamn moon and that awful disc turning in the air, silver to black to silver, and the breath falls out of her and she can't do it.

She's not exactly doing _this _with any long-term plans in mind, anyway.

##

It's not so different, being on the streets. It's colder and dirtier, and there's a lot less respect, but being invisible suits her.

The regulars in the area learned after one light headtap that she wasn't an easy mark. She stakes out her turf on Washburn and Duluth, a nook behind a little trattoria with a sympathetic cook and a pair of bull mastifs that guard the dumpster by virtue of looking terrifying and being about as mobile as wet beanbags. After a few days one of them deigns to keep her warm at night, a contact both unexpected and touching in its simple acceptance. That night she lays there in the dark listening to street fights and bar music with an ache in her throat, a furry mountain breathing beside her, and a vague sense of safety she hasn't known in so long it feels like something is cracking inside her.

The next night she moves a few inches -all she can manage in the close space of a cardboard box- away from that gigantic back and curls up shivering and alone.

She has made no friends. She doesn't want to. Sharing an oil-drum fire long enough to warm her hands up is about as close as she wants to get to anybody.

She spends her days walking. It's soothing, and it keeps her warm. Her city is so much deeper and wider than she knew. Her beat, back when she'd been new and pounding pavement, had allowed her glimpses of that labyrinthine breadth, but much, much less than she'd ever guessed. Now that she's shed every part of herself she cared for she is swallowed like a child in a forest by alleys, by crumbling warehouses and condemned buildings, and then finally by the collapsed underground, built and abandoned back when the graft and backroom handshake industrial boom of the sixties met a hard truth about digging tunnels in ledge. Even the ground here fights back.

She stops being careful at the end of her thirtieth night living in a cardboard box, marking her two-month anniversary of unemployment with a trip down into the remains of the subway system. Not caring doesn't mean fearless: her left hand is in her pocket, where a tear in the fabric lets her grip the cold hard handle of a baton, and her breath shivers in her chest. It's dark and it smells like piss and busted concrete and old anger. The tunnels are empty, forgotten before they ever became anything, and they do not hold a single memory of human ambition or human terror.

She leans against a crumbling wall and holds her breath until the echoes of her presence die away, until the faraway sound of light late traffic above and the drip of water fills her ears and hollows out her tired mind.

The cardboard was starting to fall apart anyway.

##

It's warmer underground.

The dripping noise turns out to be a busted storm drain, and while the water is not exactly clear, it's cleaner than she is. She huddles next to it in the still hour before dawn when even the traffic far above has fallen silent, and strips, soaking a corner of one blanket in the cool flow and slowly rubbing the accumulated filth of the streets from her skin. Her hands press harder and harder, dragging at her body as though she can scrub away indifference, shame, fury, fear; these things she never did quite shed, which cling to her along with every stupid, selfish act she wrought in the world, everything she fucked up, everyone she failed and oh, she failed so many.

Her name, which means _merciful grace_ and which she distorted into _broken trust_, _lost honor_, _cowardice_, has followed her under the world; it's as much a part of her as the air in her lungs. It's written under the dirt on her skin, hiding in the diminished curve of her breasts, the mats in her hair. There is no place in the world, however dark and lost, where she can hide. She has been trying to achieve the impossible: _invisible_ is a state of grace, and it's not an option for people like her. Earned, not given.

_Make it right, miha_, her mother whispers, echo from a time when the answer to broken things was simpler, a Hail Mary and a sorry and a week of doing extra chores. _Make it better._

Nothing can make her right.

Her eyes and nose are running before she gets to her face, her chest hitching. She swallows until she can breathe and scrubs until she's raw and aching and clean, or as clean as she will ever be again, which isn't very.

She's lost close to twenty pounds. Her hands, learning the shape of her again, find new angles and hollow places. It's fascinating and awful, how fast she has become something else, how she is still herself regardless. She soaks her underwear and her tee-shirt, wrings them dry. She thinks about how to get a pot, a comb, how to build a fire, where to find a change of clothes. She would like a scarf and gloves. It's gotten cold above.

The shelter on Third opens at seven most mornings, and there will be hot cheap coffee and no questions.

##

There's a certain cadence to street beats that you learn after a few days: the walk, the way to hold your shoulders, the way to look at things. The things to pay attention to, the things you can let go.

Walking this way, looking this way, without the uniform and the authority that comes with it - that will get you killed. Her city isn't forgiving, in any sense of the word. It's on Pollard, hovering at the edges of the produce market in broad daylight, that she gets jumped for the first time.

In the space of a few seconds she learns that there are shades of invisibility after all. She cannot hide from herself, yet she cannot make herself visible, audible, _important _to the pedestrians passing not fifty feet from where she lies curled against herself to protect her organs, elbows over her temples. The batons are in reach, and it doesn't matter. There's nothing on her worth stealing (that they find) and it's over quickly, hands tugging at her clothes as she makes herself a ball and tries to breathe past the fire spilling from her bruised kidneys. Then there's a growl, and the hands leave just as they were starting to reach for other things, things she might, in spite of herself, still find worth defending. A dull bass roar sounds off next to her ear and she kicks herself back against the bricks, curling tighter.

Then a cold damp thing presses against her cheek, and she opens her eyes to a nose the size of a basketball above a wet red maw and teeth like yellow scissors, and she takes a breath full of rancid mastiff, and almost smiles.

He follows her down into the underground, bounding ahead, not patient with her slow, limping progress but not quite leaving her sight either. He spends the rest of the evening killing rats with bloody enthusiasm. She gives him most of her rice, and doesn't roll away this time, when he curls up next to her.

He's definitely going to need some kind of bath if this is going to be a regular thing.


	2. coin toss

They still speak his name with faith on the streets.

She hears it in shelters, in alleyways and soup kitchens and on dirty snow-splashed corners, whispered like a secret or a threat, flung out in challenge, a talisman against the ugliness of humanity. It's the evil eye of the modern world. It's stopped fistfights, and started them. Spat like a curse or whispered like prayer, it's almost always accompanied by an involuntary flicker of the eyes skyward.

It's a different kind of fear from what she's known of him- and not that different at all, when you get down to it. That sense of single-minded fury in motion, of a force that cannot be turned aside from its chosen course, is exactly the same; the application is what has changed. In crime scenes he was frightening for a handful of reasons, all (well, most) of them practical. He was a gaping hole in the chain of evidence, no matter his usefulness, his access to things her department could never have hoped to get their hands on. He was a wild card- the original, no matter what his enemies called themselves- and his pursuit of justice left such a trail of wreckage there was no sorting it out later, what had been worth it, what had been too costly to excuse his interference. A walking weapon of mass destruction with the disposition of a pissed-off robot and the delicacy of a hand grenade, inviting extremes in all who dared to challenge him, justifying means by way of messy ends he never consulted on or explained.

More power than any one man should have, restrained by no leash but the steadfast, unquestioning faith of a single overworked cop who had already given the city most of his life, and one death so far.

And honestly- there is no reason not to be honest now, she has found- it was just impossible for her to trust a man who refused to show his face.

In the precinct they'd speculated and hissed over the hints of his presence: a man left unconscious outside the building with a calling card on his chest, a packet appearing on a desk like magic, a sudden silence while walking a beat. He was somewhere between hero and threat.

Shivering at tables where the stench of cheap booze and cigarette smoke and unwashed human drowns out the scent of thin potato soup, they hiss in the same manner, with the same undertone of fearful admiration. But here there is hope. There is even pride. And a ferocious denial of what still cycles on the news every few days, when the latest shakedown of the straggling pockets of Maroni's people stops grabbing ratings. He is there, and so is Dent: a name she can now make her thoughts shape, but whose face she refuses to see except in sweating nightmares.

They don't talk about Dent here.

They never knew Dent, these people in their ragged mismatched clothes and their defiant hopelessness; they are the city's human vermin, invisible and uninvited. They didn't know him when he was IA or DA, the city's brave, sunlit knight in squeaky-clean armor; they didn't know him when he was maddened with pain and grief, both his faces rendered down to that vicious animal that lives in the deepest recesses of every human being. They didn't know his uncompromising grip on fairness, at its best or its gruesome worst, and they never had to fear the toss of his pitiless coin.

Neither what he was nor what she helped turn him into live in the memories if the city's least wanted.

But oh, they remember the Bat. And more of them saw _him_ than she would ever have imagined possible.

She listens.

_And I swear to you! I'm standin there and they fightin, knives all over the place and she's screamin like a fuckin crazyperson, he just drops right down in the middle like the fuckin hand a god and I din even know what happen then, but they was all on the ground-_

_Well he was flying when I saw him - I shit you not, don't give me that look! You know how he could-_

_Saw him bust out of this strip mall once, thought the goddamn world was ending. That crazy bike thing-_

She is at the end of the long folding table, huddled in her coat, staring at her soup, silent. Memories are turning in her mind like coins, dark to bright and back again, sharp as needles. A gathering on a rootfop; the crunch of shattering glass and pop of camera flashes; the quiet strain on Gordon's face. A swift darkness streaking from a window.

The careless trust in Dent's smile as he slid into the van. The way the coin hung in the air like even gravity was suspended for those few seconds; the way everything in her fell still, waiting for the bullet, fearing and wanting it.

The tug on her sleeve startles her so badly she grabs before she thinks. She pulls back in quick dismay when she sees she's caught a child by the collar of his ragged coat, and that he is frightened. His face is so filthy it's impossible to tell his race; his hair is in the same state, so dirt-coated it sticks up in all directions. His eyes are green, and huge. He is much too thin.

Children aren't excused from suffering: no law of man or nature prevents it. She knows this. She is still shocked.

Freed, he rises up on his toes, preparing to bolt. She leans away, takes her spoon up, watches him from the corner of one eye. After a moment he settles back onto his heels and nods once at the attendant, who has wandered close and is hovering, ready to separate them. The gesture is too old for a boy, too wise to the motives of herself, the attendant, their curious but largely indifferent table-mates. He has a fading bruise on his chin. His coat is too big for him: it swallows his hands and hips. There's a hat stuffed in one gaping side pocket. From the other, he draws a curiosity that has her hand twitching toward a nonexistent sidearm. It's black and gun-shaped and far too big to be a handgun, and it has something atop the barrel that is like a scope, but closer to a radar screen. It makes his grip sag, though he clutches it with both possessiveness and familiarity.

He's smart enough to hold it where it is shielded by table, where only she can see it.

"He gave it to me," the kid whispers. She believes it immediately. The combination of military efficiency and fantastic technology are familiar: the suit has a similar look, toeing a newly-drawn, insane line between over-the-top Hollywood drama and professional assassin.

Why the Bat would hand over such a thing to a child she cannot fathom. She extends one finger, slow like coaxing traumatized domestic violence victims out of closets or talking down jumpers, and rubs the barrel. It_feels _like a gun.

It's definitely not a gun.

Finding her voice takes more than a minute, and it comes out rusty with disuse. The kid looks like he's about to dive under the table by the time she gets her mouth open.

"Why'r you showing me this," she says, and thinks _There, you're still in the world after all, in spite of everything you've done. What do you do now?_

Tears brim and spill, out of nowhere, and she wipes her cheek. Neither the boy at her side nor any other occupant of this table of the lost gives this the slightest acknowledgment: invisibility is its own protection in some ways, and people who have left their lives behind rarely begrudge one another the freedom of their sorrow.

"You're a cop," the boy whispers.

Oh, she could howl like a dog; she could rip her own hair out like those grieving women did at funerals in ancient Greece- she could swallow that barrel, if only there were a bullet waiting to launch from it. She could kneel at this dirty child's feet and beg, a thing she has only done once, and only for her mother's life, and never since. None of these things will take it back though, what she has done, what she has made of herself, and so she swallows twice, pain spearing into her chest, and shakes her head.

"It's mine," the boy says warily, as though her gaze on the thing is a threat, and on the streets it probably is. She has had the protection of her adulthood and her cop's stride, except for those times when these things are an invitation; this child has nothing with which to defend himself.

"If he gave it to you, it definitely is," she agrees. The mystery of why he _would_ can be left for later consideration. It's hardly relevant to her life now, in any case. The boy meets her eyes, his gaze so bright, so compelling in its haunted ferocity that she feels herself fall still again, waiting. She wonders that everyone in eyeshot doesn't look over at them, doesn't feel the strength of this.

"I thought he'd save me," the boy says. There is such a weight of simple comprehension in the statement, of what the world is like, of how unfair and dark and painful it is.

"So did I," she replies, not aware she's going to say it, nor that she thought that, until she hears herself. She has to stop and breathe for a second. "But there's one of him, and a lot of us."

She taps the barrel of the gun-radar-thing again, and pushes at it gently until its cradled in the folds of the coat. "Put that back, kid; don't let anybody here see that."

"I know that," he says, quick childish scorn. He pockets it anyway. Disappointment slides over his face and vanishes, and she feels that cracking sensation again, and makes fists against the impulse to just curl up on the floor and keen. Numb was better than this. But better isn't something she deserves.

"I'm sure you do," she rasps.

He is neither alarmed nor worried by her inability to keep herself together. He just stares, big bruised eyes in dirt-smeared face, all his wariness and broken hope there to read plain as goddamn daylight. Kids, dear god, transparent like glass and just as fragile. This battle is halfway lost already. She sets one hand on his arm and loses the rest of it when he flinches in a way any cop with more than six months of Gotham's ugliness under her belt can recognize: someone has hurt him in a very specific way. Rage chases sorrow through her veins.

She takes her hand away, slow like all of those things that it is, now. Poor goddamn kid. The coin in her memory lands clear-side up. The gun isn't pointing at her face anymore; she can remember laying on dirty pavement with a throbbing face, the promise of death unfulfilled, left with her ruined honor and her self-loathing and her life, and these are the things she has right now, nothing more nor less.

These things and the wary, world-weary, patient eyes of a boy with nowhere safe to sleep tonight.

"You want to see something cool?" she says, instead of _where are your parents, what's your name, who did this to you and where can I find them._

His smile is tiny and cautious, and probably the best thing she's seen in the last year.


End file.
